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ConceptPinterest
Summary
Pinterest is an American and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp; it had 463 million global monthly active users . It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco.
The idea for Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silberman and Paul Sciarra called Tote which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app. Tote users however were amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. The behavior struck a chord with Silberman, and he shifted the company to building Pinterest, which allowed users to create collections of a variety of items and share them with each other.
The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011.
Pinterest grew rapidly during this period. On August 10, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week.
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